Blueprints
Towards a Responsible Society
For the Third Section of the Amsterdam Assembly in 1948, themed The Church and the Disorder of Society, J.H. Oldham defined what would become the most influential concept in ecumenical thinking about the right ordering of economics and society: the responsible society. Influenced by Jacques Maritain and other Roman Catholic thinkers, Oldham argued that human communities could only flourish if the individuals in them felt they had something meaningful to contribute to the whole. With this speech, Dutch Labour politician C.L. Patijn delivered a blueprint on the translation of the responsible society concept to European unity.
For the blueprint click here.
The blueprint is courtesy of the WCC Archives in Geneva and republished here with permission.